Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/364

 have made a handsome penny by the transaction?” He often repeated the story as a good joke on me.

When I arrived in the United States again, the impeachment trial was over and President Johnson had been acquitted. There had, indeed, not been any revolutionary disturbance, but the public mind was still much agitated by what had happened. Hardly anybody will doubt to-day that in ordinarily calm times, when the judgment of man is not obscured by passion or dread of great public dangers, the things of which President Johnson stood accused, would not have been thought sufficient to call for the impeachment of a President. But the days of which I speak were still feverish with the resentments left behind by the Civil War and with the nervous apprehension that the results won at so tremendous a sacrifice of blood and treasure, might in some way be lost again. Under such circumstances a judicial temper is not easily maintained. I think I do not exaggerate in saying that an overwhelming majority of the loyal Union men North and South saw in President Johnson a traitor bent upon turning over the National Government to the rebels again, and ardently wished to see him utterly stripped of power, not so much for what he had done, but for what, as they thought, he was capable of doing and likely to do. The Republican Senators who voted for Johnson's acquittal and thus kept him in power no doubt acted conscientiously, justly and patriotically; but although some of them—such men as Fessenden, Grimes, Trumbull, Henderson and others—ranked among the ablest, wisest, and in all respects most meritorious members of that body, they were not only cried down by blatant demagogues as aiders and abettors of a new treason, but also misapprehended by patriotic citizens ordinarily calm and reasonable. When passing judgment retrospectively upon what was thought, and said, and done in those days, we may